Face annotation is very important in the management of digital photo albums, because it provides information about who is in the photos and thus can help users organize and manage their digital albums. Although there are already many commercial products that try to assist with electronic photo album annotation, they all require human annotations, a tedious task very few users will perform.
Most conventional products offer a degree of image management for digital photo albums, but the image management is similar to the file management, which is based on the name, size, date/time and other properties of the image files. Face annotation is not provided. Only manual annotation of images is provided in conventional products.
In one conventional product, faces in photos are detected automatically by a face detector and if a user would like to annotate the faces, the conventional system calculates a candidate list of names from which the user annotates each face. The candidate list can be calculated according to a face's similarity with already annotated faces. The user might accept one of the recommendations, or instead enter a new name for the face. In a typical scenario, if a user desires to label a face, the user moves a mouse onto the face, and a candidate name list pops up to provide one or more recommendations.